London Journal; Lords of the Manor, but Maybe Not of the House

By SARAH LYALL

Published: August 4, 1998

LONDON, Aug. 3—
Now is not a good time to be a peer of the realm.

Derided by the Foreign Secretary as ''medieval lumber,'' routinely lampooned for being out of date and out of touch, the country's 700 or so hereditary peers, whose titles pass down from generation to generation, are living on borrowed time.

Sometime in the next year, the Labor Government is likely to introduce legislation that will strip all of them -- the dukes, the marquesses, the earls, the viscounts, the countesses and the barons -- of a right that has been theirs for centuries, the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords.

The reasoning is simple. ''If I were in an aircraft and the pilot said, 'I am not a pilot myself, but my grandfather was a pilot,' I would leave the plane at once,'' said Tony Benn, a Labor member of Parliament who enjoyed a brief, shining moment as the second Viscount Stansgate, but who went to court in 1963 to strip himself of the title.

''If I went to a dentist and he said, 'I am not a dentist, but my dad was a dentist in the 1920's -- open your mouth,' I would not listen to him for five minutes,'' he told the House of Commons.

Such talk understandably raises the hackles of people like Lord Hastings, the 22d in a baronial line that snakes spectacularly back to 1290.

''It's very easy to repeat certain stereotypes and make fun of us,'' Lord Hastings said. ''Admittedly, the system is not democratic, and nowadays everything has to be democratic. But hereditary peers are not just landowners who are sitting there drawing rent.''

As if to drive home that point, the House of Lords, the upper house in Britain's legislature, has spent the last few months demonstrating that there is life in the old institution yet. Exercising its right to thwart the Government by delaying legislation by up to a year, it voted down, on more than 31 occasions, measures passed by the House of Commons.

In the most recent case, the Lords overwhelmingly defeated a measure that would have lowered the age of consent for gay sex to 16 from 18. The measure had been passed by a wide majority in the Commons, and its defeat threatened to scuttle the Government's criminal justice bill, one of the legislative centerpieces of the parliamentary session that ended on Friday. The Government was forced to give in and drop the measure from the bill.

Britain's tabloid newspapers, which tend to portray the aristocrats in the House of Lords as a bunch of Monty Python-esque upper-class twits, showered them with praise this time, calling them members of the ''People's House of Lords.''

Never mind that the Lords' debate included this remark from the Earl of Longford: ''A girl is not ruined for life by being seduced. A young fellow is.'' (''Lord Longford is 92,'' Andrew Rawnsley wrote in The Observer of London, ''but he acts like a man twice his age.'')

While the Government says that such votes show the dangerous ability of an unelected body to block the will of elected representatives, defenders of the hereditary peers say they prove just the opposite. Although the House of Lords is overwhelmingly Conservative, they say, it serves as a valuable check on any government too prone to using its huge majority to rush ill-conceived legislation through the Commons.

''We have a reforming Government which has introduced a number of far-reaching bills that, in some cases, have not been very well drafted and not very well thought out, and it is our duty to point that out,'' said Lord Bridges, one of 323 ''cross-bench'' peers in the House of Lords, meaning he has no party affiliation.

And Lord Raglan, another cross-bencher who, at the age of 70, no longer attends the House of Lords much, said approvingly that the Lords had ''been showing some fight'' recently.

''Because we don't have any constituents and you can't get sacked, you are much freer to follow your own ideas,'' said Lord Raglan, who has never lived down his maiden speech to the House of Lords in 1965.

''My Lords, I am sorry that I have only just arrived,'' he told the house then. ''I have had a series of misfortunes with my motor car. I am covered in oil and quite flustered.''

Despite their heroic last stand, the peers are having a hard time getting past formidable image problems.

''These guys don't have any special qualifications or qualities -- they might be prats, drug addicts, halfwits or deadbeats -- and there's no reason for them to tell you or me what we should do,'' said Hilary Boyd, a writer whose grandfather was an earl but who has no title of her own, because the peerage passed down the male line of the family.

There is no question that in between discussing the pressing issues of the day, members of the House of Lords have a tendency to meander off on weird tangents.

Last week, for instance, Lord Blyth initiated a debate about the problem of spitting in public, particularly by sports figures. It prompted Lord McIntosh to concede that, yes, ''spitting is an unpleasant habit which sets a poor example.''

Viscount Long weighed in: ''Spitting is one thing, but chewing gum is another. Would it not be an idea for the Government to introduce a bill banning chewing gum altogether?'' (It would not, Lord McIntosh responded.)

Lord Finn, who, as the second son of an earl, is not entitled to sit in the House of Lords, said, ''It's pretty silly when you see some of them who are not particularly bright.''

''It doesn't help when you see somebody who is a peer and is a drug addict,'' he added. ''You think, 'Oh my God, that man is a hopeless case and he can come out of prison and he can sit in the House of Lords.' That gives a bad name to the whole lot. They should keep the good ones and sack the other ones.''

The biggest headache surrounding the impending Lords reform is that the Government doesn't know what it will replace the hereditary peers with. The current House of Lords includes 477 life peers -- who are appointed by the Government and who can't pass their titles on when they die -- but the prospect of an upper house full of Government appointees doesn't hold much appeal.

Lord Dean, a life peer since 1983, said it wasn't fair to write off the hereditaries, as peers generally call them, just because they happened to be the son of the son of somebody who once hobnobbed with a monarch.

''I think it's a bit unfair to lampoon them as a bunch of bloody dumbos and nincompoops,'' said Lord Dean, who was plain old Joe Dean when he ran the Manchester City Council.

''Some of them are very talented and clever,'' he continued, ''and the life peers aren't overburdened with geniuses any more than any other group.''

Photo: The House of Lords has been dismissed by many in Britain as an anachronism. But Lord Raglan, who now spends more time in his greenhouse than in the House, lauded the Lords for showing some spirit recently. (Jeff Morgan for The New York Times)